Drop shadows

[Simon Ubsdell]

Hey, you don’t need me 😉 That’s looking pretty good.

Now the only question … is does it work?

Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com

[John Mendelsohn]

Oh, I need you all right, Simon. Not working, not a bit. No trace of anything in the Motion Templates folder.

[John Mendelsohn]

Here’s the problem. After tidying up my Motion Templates folder, I quit FCPX, and then relaunched to enjoy the fruits of my labours. No joy. Looking in my Movies folder, I discover that the application seems to be generating a new, second, Motion Templates folder every time I launch it! Hence the disappearance I alluded to at the beginning of this ordeal about the disappearance of the plugins you suggested, and which I downloaded and installed, months ago!

How to solve this, Simon?

[John Mendelsohn]

Success! Moved the Motion Templates folder containing all my goodies to the desktop. Launched FCPX. When it generated a new Motion Templates folder inside Movies, I copied all the stuff from the one on the desktop into it. Voila! So my question now is: How can I convince the application that I have quite enough Motion Templates folders (that is, one) now, and it needn’t trouble itself generating a second every time I launch it?

[Andreas Kiel]

John,

Here is just a guess.

Once you downloaded and tried to install your first custom template and created your “Motion Templates” folder you just named it “Motion Templates” but to make it work it should be named “Motion Templates.localized” — though you won’t see the “.localized” in the folder name.
You can change that within the info panel for that folder.

If FCPX doesn’t find a “Motion Templates” folder it will create a new one. But there is already a folder “Motion Templates” but with extension “.localized” an therefore FCPX will create a new one with the name “Motion Templates 1.localized” to prevent overwriting your old folder. That’s good one the one hand, but bad on the other hand since FCPX will look on launch for the “Motion Templates.localized” folder, which obviously does not exist and will create another one with a new number which won’t we accepted with the next launch.

That’s the reason my MTT tool won’t work in your case — it does look for the same paths FCPX is looking for.

So you may try following:
Move your “Motion Templates” folder(s) to a folder on the desktop then use the MTT app to install one of the templates which do come with a “.mtt” file without changing anything within the path settings in the MTT app.
The MTT app will create the structure FCPX needs.

Then — be careful — move/copy manually the ‘old’ template folders to the newly created “Motion Templates” folder.

Careful why?

Once you used a “.mtt” and the MTT app there will be a folder dependent on the kind of template. This means you got a path structure something like …/Motion Templates.localized/Effects/… and nothing else.
To add effects from your original “Effects” folder you have to put them into this folder. If you got “Titles” or other types of templates you can move them to the to the “Motion Templates” folder if they don’t exist as FCPX doesn’t care about the “.localized” extension for subfolders in this case.

Next thing is:
What’s about your projects? FCPX projects rely on the finder path for templates. So you have to be extremely careful to move the templates to a place where it had been found with the projects. This could result in a need for a double installation of the same template to keep the settings of the templates within your projects. If you don’t do it behaves like an offline clip, you can apply the filter again but most often your settings, keyframes, etc are lost.

I’ve spent a real lot of of hours since last year to figure out how to handle all this great free templates which are available.
Alex, Simon and many more do support my “.mtt” format (Thanks to all of them here). It does take them additional time to make those templates available. So “agree” to those paths they suggest within the “.mtt” file. Makes your life easier and that of the contributors in case trouble shooting as well.

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools

[John Mendelsohn]

Many thanks. I will, when I summon the requisite courage, try it. 🙂